Have you ever noticed how certain scents evoke memories for us?
This is a scientific endeavour.
In the womb, a fetus's only fully formed sense is smell.
Smell and emotion are combined into a single memory.
As a result, those smells transport us back in time.
The scent of mangoes transports us back to our childhood summer vacations.
And it's for this reason that businesses have jumped into the olfactory branding game.
It's no surprise that we've become numb to brands messaging, given that the average user is bombarded with up to 5,000 advertisements of various types every day.
Scent, on the other hand, stimulates the olfactory bulb and allows customers to make implicit associations that other types of advertising cannot.
After all, what is olfactory branding?
Olfactory branding is a marketing discipline based on the association of a certain odor to a brand, in order to be remembered immediately upon feeling its aroma. Olfactory branding seeks to position a brand in the consumer's mind with an odour.
Brand advertisers are well aware that advertisements that appeal to the sense of smell are 100 times more likely to be recalled than ads that appeal to the senses of hearing, seeing, or touch.
The olfactory logo, like a graphic logo, is used in every advertising, retail, or business environment.
The scent becomes closely associated with a brand after repeated exposures to the olfactory logo. Scent branding, a marketing phenomenon that the experts at Air Scent have been doing for more than seven decades, is another term for creating such a logo. Abercrombie & Fitch, W Hotel, and Dunkin Donuts are some successful examples of businesses that have had tremendous financial success with olfactory logos.
Burger King uses its ventilation ducts to arouse the sensation of hunger among its visitors.How? Using a fragrance with smell of Whopper, his most famous hamburger, in order to whet the appetite and increase sales of their products
The retail, hotel and luxury sectors were the pioneers of olfactory marketing.
Hotels such as Taj Hotels Palaces, Resorts, Safaris use jasmine as its signature fragrance. It is symbolic of India, and is known for its therapeutic qualities that inspire calmness and tranquillity. As a fragrance that is native to India, this scent was carefully crafted to provide an immediate reminder of the quintessential ‘Taj’ experience as soon as a guest walks through the doors of a Taj Hotel.
According to many brand marketing study books, “people can remember smells with a 65 percent accuracy after a year, but visual recall of images drops to about 50% after just three months.”
So, olfactory marketing has a bright (scented) future, and our noses will long be titillated! The next time you walk through the doors of a shop or an hotel, take a deep breath and train your sense of smell to recognize a scent that might influence your behavior…
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